Sunday, January 01, 2017

It’s
been a long time since I’ve felt the need to address the New Year. Things
seemed to be progressing at a pretty normal pace. It seemed my input wasn’t
necessary like it was for your siblings 2012 and 2014.

And then
there was your sibling 2016 – the Hannibal Lechter of years. I realize now
that, as New Years go, these little discussions are mandatory since evidently
subjective and arbitrary timeframes have no respect for decency.

In the
past, I’ll admit I’ve judged you and your siblings on the crap you flung at me,
personally. It never occurred to me that, lacking my direction, you’d expand
your systematic destruction to the world at large.

So…2017…we
need to talk. Because evidently, like a pre-teen, you seem to think that if I
don’t specifically tell you not to do
something, it automatically means it’s okay to do. For instance – I never said
to my kids, “don’t play Jousting Tournament on your bicycles.” I went for the
simple “don’t be a moron,” assuming that would prevent them from careening at
each other with the gas grill rotisserie shafts. I was wrong.

Indeed,
I never specifically told your
sibling, 2016, to not bring our entire civilization to its knees. At this time
last year, such as statement was sort of like telling someone “don’t take any
wooden nickels.” Such a phrase was outdated because any idiot would know the
difference between a sanctioned, intricately-minted coin and a piece of
worthless junk carved to look like something of value that can slip through a dysfunctional
mechanism.

And so
2016 was the year that was so horrible, a bevy of celebrities opted to jump
ship rather than endure even one more week of it. It was the year so horrible
that even the people who got their way still seemed to be really mad at the
people who didn’t. It was the year no one was happy.

What has
made it even worse is that 2016 packed up and disappeared, but didn’t take its
garbage with it. So here we are, drowning in the detritus of your sibling and
you show up expecting some sort of celebration.

Well 2017,
you’re going to have to prove yourself. Frankly, you don’t have a whole lot to
work with and Kardashian mutations are still infesting every aspect of our
culture (deep down I suspect this is the root of all the world’s problems).